Tag Archive for ‘Sea of Poppies’ at Asian Window

Tag Archive for 'Sea of Poppies'

‘Token Asians’ in the Booker shortlist

Published

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on September 10, 2008

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Aravind Adiga

The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize, considered to be the most prestigious award for literary fiction in English, is out. Early favourite, Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence gets passed over while two other Indian writers — Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies) and the 33-year-old Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger) make it to the final six.

BBC lists the six who made it.

In The Telegraph (UK), James Delingpole is unimpressed with the list of ‘token Asians’, ‘Irish misery novelist’ and ‘gay’ writer — usual suspects. But writers rarely slag off other novelist or, for that matter, literary awards.

Token Asian; Oirish misery novelist; another token Asian; Guardian woman; gay; token Australian wild-card with beard who looks definitely a bit foreign. Hmm. I wonder which of the usual suspects on the shortlist is going to win the Booker Prize this year.

“Aaagh!” I’m going to go, when I see these appallingly sexist, racist, homophobic words under my byline in bald print in a respectable, widely read national newspaper. “Did I really write that sentence? Was I drunk? Was I trying to kill my literary career stone dead?”

Amitav Ghosh

And in The Telegraph (India), Amit Roy takes a closer look at the Indian contenders

Two books by Indian authors — Sea of Poppies by Calcutta-born Amitav Ghosh and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, a debut novelist from Chennai — have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

There was bitter disappointment for Pakistani author Mohammed Hanif, whose much-fancied A Case of Exploding Mangoes was on the long-list of 13 novels announced in July and was being talked about as the probable winner.

In The Guardian, why Salman Rushdie not is “not good enough” for Booker shortlist:

Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence was simply not a good enough book to make it past the longlist stage of this year’s Booker prize, according to the chair of judges, Michael Portillo. To add insult to the double Booker of Booker winner’s injured pride, Portillo added that the judges didn’t even spend that much time discussing it.

“I can say that the discussions we had about Salman Rushdie, as with all the other books, was a discussion about the book and not about the author. It was about the merits of the book,” he told guardian.co.uk after the press conference at which the shortlist was announced.

“In the opinion of these five people taken together, Salman Rushdie’s was not one of the top six books for us. We didn’t have a huge debate about it.”

Confessions of a Poppy writer

Published

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on June 9, 2008

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In Hindustan Times, Amitav Ghosh goes behind the curtains of his latest novel, The Sea of Poppies, and talks about what led him to this epic tale of drug-running and sea-faring.

Near the beginning of Sea of Poppies, Deeti, the central character, has a vision of the Ibis, the schooner that will eventually carry her away from India. For me, too, the book began in much the same way – except that the vision that was revealed to me was of Deeti herself. I knew from the start that her story would be the main current of this novel; she would be the river that carried the weight of its many tributary streams.

One of the reasons why I was drawn to Deeti’s story is that my own ancestors set off on their travels at about the same time as she did: the difference was that they moved in the opposite direction. The founder of the family is said to have left his village in eastern Bengal in the early part of the 19th century. Moving gradually westwards, he came to a halt in 1856, when he settled in Chhapra, a small town in Bihar – the very place in which Deeti and Kalua come to their fateful decision to sever their links with the past and seek a new life overseas. It was this unnamed ancestor who led me into the story of opium by prompting me to wonder why he had ended up where he did. What led him to settle in this relatively obscure place? What opportunities could he have been seeking? This was then the world’s single most important poppy-growing region and was thus one of the chief sources of the wealth of the British Raj. Such opportunities as existed there must have been connected with opium in some way. Could it be that the star that ruled my family’s destiny – and thus my own – was the same as Deeti’s, that is to say, the seed of the poppy?

Previously in AW: Lascars, sepoys and nautch girls

Lascars, sepoys and nautch girls

Published

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on June 8, 2008

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In The Guardian, James Buchan reviews Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh:

This terrific novel, the first volume in a projected trilogy, unfolds in north India and the Bay of Bengal in 1838 on the eve of the British attack on the Chinese ports known as the first opium war. In Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh assembles from different corners of the world sailors, marines and passengers for the Ibis, a slaving schooner now converted to the transport of coolies and opium. In bringing his troupe of characters to Calcutta and into the open water, Ghosh provides the reader with all manner of stories, and equips himself with the personnel to man and navigate an old-fashioned literary three-decker.

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